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FAMILY KARMA:
Do We Choose the Family
We Incarnate Into?
May 22, 2026​
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Generally, most of us assume and believe that karma is a “payback” for actions that we’ve either taken or neglected. This is likely a function of us being taught as children, through training and observation, that authority comes from outside of ourselves. As small children we can understand this in terms of our need for safety due to our inexperienced innocence and our parents’ concern for that safety and with our need to learn the ways of the physical world. It is hoped that eventually we will become older and become our own authority as a result of becoming parents ourselves. In many cases, this may be the case but, for many people, the transfer to assume authority to ourselves never occurs. Unconsciously, our authority still resides with our parents. Our culture and media have reinforced this childhood attitude by encouraging us to put our trust and authority into the hands of “the experts.” Unconsciously, we follow them assuming that this avoids any measure of accountability and therefore releases us from any form of judgment or retribution which rests at the core of our belief that karma is a “payback.” Unfortunately, this belief, even now, still remains for many of us who have not grown into assuming authority over ourselves and following our own values that come as a result of having our own experiences. But the universe has other plans for our growth into maturity based on the real definition of karma. This exemplifies the old adage that “man makes plans and God laughs.”
To truly understand the mechanism of karma, we must first recognize our own emotional investment in any situational outcome and understand that karmic action has no emotional predisposition. It is simply an energetic action/reaction dynamic. Nature constantly moves toward rebalancing what is not at rest or stasis. As an example, this means that if a pendulum is thrust toward one side, the universe will ultimately push it in the opposite direction in equal measure to counter and then neutralize any imbalance by bringing it back to rest in the center.
Human movement is no different whether the movement is physical, emotional or mental. Whatever we push off balance, aka manipulate to bring us favor over others, the universe will bring circumstances that return the imbalanced pendulum back to center. Simply put, to every action taken the universe creates an equal and opposite reaction to neutralize imbalances. This is one of the three Laws of Motion postulated by Sir Isaac Newton. Now that we understand this, let’s move back to our discussion about karma as it relates to our human cycle of reincarnation.
When we exit a prior life, there are many unresolved issues and whether they are physical, emotional or mental, they create an overall imbalance in our energy matrix. These imbalances have set the foundation for how we’ve handled life in the manner in which we did up until our last passing. You might even go so far as to say that our life decisions polarized our choices toward a lifestyle and career that we believe gave us an advantage over the people and circumstances that we were born into. These polarizations and predispositions still remain in our energy matrix even after we pass. We can compare this state of being to natural elements as they are combined in chemistry to form charged isotopes or ions requiring their combining with elements of an opposing polarity to return their imbalance back to neutrality. With this understanding under our belt, let’s bring our awareness of our imbalanced energetic state up to the time of our re-incarnation.
The process of our reincarnation is much like the magnetic attraction that happens between the opposing poles of a magnet. The north pole is attracted to the south pole and the south pole is attracted to the north pole. When or if they connect, they effectively neutralize each other’s pull. At this point in comprehending the mechanism at work here we can see similarity in having an analogy with our polarized spirit and its attraction to a particular perspective relative to our pending incarnation. This can seem a little dicey and intangible in what is attracting what, but I think you’ll be able to sense what I am alluding to. Let’s set up the scenario.
When the point of incarnation is at hand, our spirit has the sum of its accumulated experiences within a reasonably balanced framework of evolved awareness, but some of our more recent experiences have yet to be “incorporated” into our spirit’s full “integration.” In other words, some of our energy “biases” still must be brought back more into a “neutral” state. These biases can be faults, extreme characteristics or impediments, desires, avoidances, supremely developed abilities and skills, or generally, a combination of balanced, underdeveloped and over-developed perspectives experienced in our prior human form.
On the receiving end we will have a few families who have just the right intensities and biases to encourage our incarnating spirit to rebalance itself by either aligning with or resisting the biased perspectives that our future families live and profess their lives by. Their biases will likely be strongly opposing or aligned with the imbalanced or polarized intensities with which we finished our prior life. As with the magnets, the force will follow nature’s process and produce a strong pull to unite the opposing poles in order to cancel the polarized charge of our past lives and bring the energies back to a universal neutral. Let’s paint a picture so we can see the process in action.
If over the past life you have developed your focus and endurance in applying your energy to tasks where your goals and objectives require these same qualities to be successful, you will have developed an extra strong ability in these areas. The upside would be the feeling of accomplishment of your undaunted application of attention and effort. To your perception, this would amount to your achieving excellence. However, with every laser pointed focus, other areas requiring a share of your attention and observation might likely have been missed or ignored. As with any type of hyper-focusing, these and other issues in life might have suffered from lack of attention. This includes the people that were close to you and who may have needed your attention and assistance and didn’t receive it. In this type of focus we often become oblivious to their feelings of neglect by us as a result of our lack of sensitivity to their wants and needs due to our hyper-focusing. So, you may have developed some admirable personal abilities of focus and endurance in the prior life but at the same time created a deficit or absence of the sensitivities required for you to maintain a balanced emotional rapport with others. So, up until now, you have effectively set the stage for what must be rebalanced in your next incarnation.
Now, for our next likely incarnation, energy needs to be applied in ways and places that will bring our extremes of application and neglect of others into a place of balance. Additionally, we may, at the same time, have the opportunity to further refine a whole host of other energies and issues into an evenness of application in a universally aligned expression of our human form.
There may be many potentially expectant family groups that match the environmental and perceptual structures that we need to fulfill our rebalancing. In our choice of where to “land,” the more dominantly out of balance issues will “automatically” take precedence and literally pull us into a specifically intense family setting. However, we may have some choice in the more peripheral issues.
The families that will present the more strongly aligned requirements will likely be those who provide a stronger neglect of us than we had toward others simply because this is what must be presented to us strongly enough to get our attention geared toward our becoming conscious of the need to rebalance those issues. Since we were neglectful and may have been obtuse to the needs of others, the new family may actually hold some abusive tendencies simply because the added intensity might be what is necessary to get us to pay attention. This will, hopefully bring our effort into becoming aware of the needs and wants of others, provide the circumstances for us to work past the anger and hurt that this normally generates and ultimately bring us into a headspace of working for or with others by helping them accomplish their needs and wants. It might even have enough intensity to encourage us to join groups and movements geared toward applying personal assistance and compassion to the support of others through a career.
As the larger anomalies in imbalanced energies are handled through extreme family dispositions, other minor discrepancies will be addressed in outer world venues along with the “rewards” for qualities that we’ve refined in previous lives. Energy applications that have less of an off balance extreme, like how to address others rather than if, can be met with a wider array of contrasting people and their patterns of rapport rather than the concentrated effects of family exposure. For example, socially finding ourselves amidst people of differing faiths and cultures can broaden our interpersonal skills, rapport and can contribute to the reshaping of our belief system.
Overall, there is usually a mix of many characteristics, refined and not, that will create our magnetic pull into a specific type of family lineage. Generally, the pull of extreme and imbalanced energies will create a pull equal to the strength and intensity of desired and enjoyable circumstances giving a blend of lessons and “rewards.” This encourages our choice toward a family setting that will actually offer the needed type of pressures necessary for the handled rebalancing of our perspectives and our use of energy.
At this point I think that we can see that the family lineage that we next incarnate into is not so much a “punishment” as many of us might assume but a “simple” rebalancing of our perspectives so we move more into alignment with how the energies of the universe naturally operate. The idea that we are being “punished” comes from a childhood rearing instilling into us a belief that we must be primarily responsible to the social rules and regulations that are indicative of our man-made culture. In this we are taught that we are not enough as we are, that we are “born in sin” and that the assistance and guidance of others is a necessary requirement for our life choices. On the whole, this perspective will enable us to blame karma and outside forces for any “misfortunes” we may encounter rather than understanding that we have generated the resulting energies and circumstances as a function of our own current and prior life choices.
Karmic “punishment” flies in the face of personal accountability. The idea that we are being “punished” pervades our culture supplementally aided by our doctrines of religion. But the simple truth is that our family connections are simply a means by which to provide the necessary backdrop and perspectives that will propel us into life activities that will bring us into life circumstances that will address our energies and biases that are the most out of balance with relative to the way the natural universal energies are “designed” to move. Family karma is simply the universe’s way of providing us an opportunity to “heal” our out of balance perspectives in a spiritual way. If we look at it as “punishment,” we invest in the projection of our shadow on others and disown our own personal accountability.
